Not sure how much more it would cost to run. If you only really talk about stuff a pi can do as well, you wont be maxing out your cores. You will use a bit more maybe. Nothing sort of whatever you only really keep in mind for monero mining.
Those zero 3W sticks have been unavailable ever since I saw it here.
My brother in christ. A used PC has powersupply, case, storage and cooling. This is about the basic kit you need for a proper pi5 experience. You can very easily hit the 100 dollar mark.
Also, most of the used business PC will have 8G RAM, which would put your little ARM funsies up to the $130 budget range.
And you would still only have 4 shitty cores, no expandability.
You can get 2 Ampere ARM cores, 4G RAM and 40G space for that money at hetzner.
The overwhelming majority of the kernel development is heavily company financed. Are you saying that despite that, the very developer should get the stipend?
Lets make one thing clear, exponentially increasing wealth/power the higher you are in society is a pretty heavy general rule of thumb to beat, whicever way you try moving the seats.
Making such a system for devs will make a pretty wealthy class of people even more privileged with de facto rules that wont apply for the rest of society more in need of money and freedom, meaning actually owning the share of income from their work even over the pay the receive from the company.
Making this a general rule for everyone will more like reshuffle thungs but the exponentiality will in some form persist. If you inevitably fuck it up the implementation phase, it wont get better any bit. You will have the same miserable pay except you own your work. So what.